Literature Circles (Francesca)

Website: http://www.litcircles.org/Overview/overview.html

There are a plethora of literature circle resources online, but this here is the mother of all literature circle websites, I reckon. To start with, it explains what literature circles are and clears up some common misconceptions about them (e.g. they are unstructured and uncontrolled periods for students to talk without accountability). More importantly, the website also offers guides on how to facilitate discussions in literature circles. There are discussion formats to choose from, as well as pre and post-discussion activities.

Personally, I’ve never taken part in any literature circle in secondary school or junior college, but I think it’s a rather effectual method of assessing students’ critical thinking skills. To begin, the teacher divides the class into small literature circles of four or five, and assigns each person a specific role. There are many different roles within a literature circle, but I believe the more common and salient roles are the discussion director (who develops questions about the text for the group to discuss), the word wizard (who picks out words that are difficult or unfamiliar words and finds their definitions), the capable connector (who finds connections between the text and the real world context), the literary luminary (who points out interesting or significant passages in the text), and the ingenious investigator (who looks up background information related to the text and author). Each person in the literature circle would assume a new role every week, so as to ensure that everyone gets to experience each role at least once.

These literature circles may be assessed informally. The teacher would sit in on a different literature circle each week and take note of the group’s interaction. We can consider the students’ abilities to contribute to the discussion through the roles they’ve been assigned and the depth of understanding demonstrated by each student.

I think one thing to take note of is that it would beneficial for the students to choose the texts they want to read and discuss (Encouraging initiative and industry! Increasing intrinsic motivation!). However, for practical reasons, it is likely that if literature circles were to be implemented in class, the students would all be discussing the assigned O / A level texts. Nonetheless, I think literature circles would still be beneficial as they ensure that every student can participate in conversation. This is particularly useful for students who are left out in or feel intimidated by classroom discussions. Also, students would be constructing their own interpretations of the text, rather than just waiting for the teacher to provide them with the “correct” analyses and being passive consumers of knowledge. Hopefully, over time the students would become familiar with the various role in a literature circle and internalise these habits, so that eventually they can effectively analyse a text on their own, with minimal guidance.